This specification relates to processing public social connection information to determine strength of social connections.
With the proliferation of online social sites (web sites with social features), a user may maintain several user accounts across multiple social sites, and may also establish online social connections by becoming friends with or by following other users. Knowledge of a user's social affinity (i.e., strength of the user's social connections) can be useful for applications that process and present information to the user. For example, the social affinity between a person performing a web search and a friend or more distant social contact associated with a particular search result may be useful in selecting, ordering, or presenting web search results.
Many social sites allow users to list their alternate accounts and various social connections publicly, and the social web sites annotate the users' public information with such user data using markup such as XHTML Friends Network (XFN) or Friend of a Friend Project (FOAF) markup. Such annotation makes it possible for users' social information to be collected from different social web sites by a web crawler.